A.W.S.M.E: The Association Of White Straight Male Employees

Do I even have to explain it, and why it’s necessary? An anecdote will help paint the picture (and by the way, I’m past the point of really caring whether my employer finds out about me writing stuff like this…maybe if they do, it could wind up being where AWSME formally makes its first stand).

Very recently, in one of my day jobs, I was asked to supervise some security guards assigned at a contract site. The previous supervisor, a white male, had just suddenly quit, having gotten fed up with a lack of overall support. All of the guards are blacks of varying reliability, the client contact is a truly tyrannical black female, the operations manager is an obnoxiously overbearing and illiterate black male, and the administrative assistant is a somewhat haughty black female. So yours truly, with all of my own issues and horrible character defects, goes into the situation as the only white person in the section, with all blacks above and below me — unless you count the offsite district manager, a white male like myself.

I knew there was going to be trouble. I had worked at the site previously. Some of the guards’ attendance and work behaviors were utterly unacceptable. My first attempt to tactfully speak to one of the guards about his tardiness and his frequent abandoning of his post without being properly relieved was met with his hostile, sullen insolence and refusal to cooperate. Then, when I took the issue up the chain of command to the district manager (he was available whereas the ops manager wasn’t), he didn’t back me up. I knew why, without anyone having to spell it out. So I told him I was inclined to just return to my previous under-the-radar assignment, working alone. Just to placate things for the time being, he quickly made that happen.

Trust me, I have plenty of examples which are much worse than that fresh thumbnail sketch from not even a week ago — that’s just the most recent and easily presented tip of the iceberg.

The district manager later admitted that he shared my general terror about trying to endure/correct certain black and female employees’ poor work performances and alarming behaviors, because of how often such employees play the “race card” and the “diversity” card, and get away with all kinds of workplace chicanery, while simultaneously complaining and threatening/bringing alleged discrimination lawsuits, shaking down companies, and often derailing or destroying white males’ careers in the process.

In this case, rather than be angry at him for not backing me up (as I have been in similar situations with managers in past jobs) this time I took the position of understanding and supporting him in merely trying to cope with impossible conditions. He has a family to support also. Like me, he’s had to cope with some of the same kinds of insanity I have in trying to make a living and survive in the Washington, D.C. area, a hyper-bastion of affirmative action on steroids.

We mutually recognized that we’re trying to tiptoe through minefields full of racial/gender-political IEDs — workplace disasters in the making for people like us, heterosexual white males, if we make the wrong move and dare cross some protected species while trying to simply do our jobs and “coexist” with those who are officially sanctioned in marking people like us for elimination.

I’ve seen it going on for decades now. As a much younger man, shortly after getting out of the military, I didn’t really believe the older white men who told me it was virtually pointless for me to apply for certain jobs, because the positions were supposedly only going to women and minorities. Since then I’ve seen the “diversity” agenda play out virtually everywhere, with white males passed over, fired, and/or disciplined at the drop of a hat, while (especially in Washington, D.C.) un- and underqualified minorities and females are catapulted to positions of power and/or otherwise virtually immune to actual accountability.

Oh, but of course it’s all only fitting social justice, don’t you know — for the legacy of hundreds of years of oppression done to women and minorities by evil white men! And the ongoing residual, institutional effects! Right, we all know the story.

Comparatively, almost nobody seems to grasp the details of the 2009 landmark Supreme Court ruling in Ricci v. DeStefano, and how it’s been nonetheless completely ignored by just about every institution, everywhere, since.

So just who will speak up for, and rally to support conservative white males in the workplace? Will you?

Join AWSME. We don’t have a website yet, don’t have any money, don’t even know how to put all that together — yet. Depending on the response to this announcement. to forthcoming developments on social media, and depending on the assistance that comes forward, we will forge ahead at whatever speed.

The Association of White Straight Male Employees is an advocacy group for people who definitely need strong advocacy. For all the talk about “white privilege,” our daily commutes to and from the modern workplace are littered with the career-carcasses of straight white Christian men who get thrown under the bus simply because of our identity.

About the author, Donald Joy: Following his service in the United State Air Force, Donald Joy earned a bachelor of science in business administration from SUNY while serving in the army national guard. As a special deputy U.S. marshal, Don was on the protection detail for Attorney General John Ashcroft following the attacks of 9/11. He lives in the D.C. suburbs of Northern Virginia with his wife and son. View all articles by Donald Joy

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